I'm a restless VC hunting for cutting-edge technologies, maverick entrepreneurs and bold contrarian theses. I've funded or founded and serve on the Board of companies ranging from high-tech nuclear waste clean up (Kurion), breakthrough metamaterials with Bill Gates (Kymeta), 3D printing (Shapeways), emerging tech research (Lux Research) and much more. My life is the intersection of science and finance, and I believe the future is already here just unevenly distributed and that the best way to predict it is to invent it. I’m passionate about education reform and celebrating science and the right heroes. I Chair a Charter School (Coney Island Prep) in my native Coney Island Brooklyn, graduated from Cornell and am active term member at the Council on Foreign Relations. I hunt for low-probability high positive consequence outcomes (aka black swans) and contrarian takes on markets and technologies.

From Sci-Fi To CyPhy: iRobot Founder Takes To The Skies

The excerpt below comes from Forbes/Wolfe Emerging Technology Report’s recent full-length interview with Helen Greiner, co-founder of iRobot and founder and CEO of CyPhy Works. In 1990, she co-founded iRobot [IRBT], which has become the global leader of mobile robots with the success of the Roomba™ Vacuuming Robot and the PackBot™ and SUGV Military Robots. Ms. Greiner served as President of iRobot until 2004 and Chairman until October 2008. She has been honored as a Technology Review Magazine “Innovator for the Next Century” and has been awarded the DEMO God Award and DEMO Lifetime Achievement Award. Helen holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and a master’s degree in computer science, both from MIT.

I wanted to build robots since I was 11 years old. Ever since I saw Star Wars, I wanted to build an R2-D2. I went to MIT to develop my skills and learned a lot there, but at the time, they didn’t really know how to build real robots, so I started a company, iRobot, right after grad school with two business partners, Ron Brooks and Colin Angle. I was at iRobot for 18 years. We got the first real robots into people’s homes with the Roomba. We got robots out into the battlefield that saved hundreds of lives. It was a dream come true for me as a robot geek to drive robotics forward at the leading company in the field. After taking iRobot public in 2005, I decided to bring together a small group of passionate people getting some real new invention done. So, I decided to do another start-up company and also decided at that time to switch to UAVs, or flying robots, because I saw so much potential. Ground robots are great, but we like to say, “The problem with ground robots is the ground.” You always have to worry about hitting things and not being able to get over steps and “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.” With flying robots, you can just fly right over obstacles.

What is the origin of the name CyPhy Works?

The name works on multiple levels. CyPhy sounds like Science Fiction, but it’s also a contraction of Cyber Physical, which is another buzzword for robots, and Works because the meaning of the word “robot” is “to do work”. Additionally, “Works” is a nod to Innovation Works, DreamWorks, and other places that are driving innovation.

You refer to CyPhy Works as a “flying robotics company”. What do you mean by that?

The first generation of UAVs was very beneficial, especially for the military, but they were really designed to go from Point A to Point B in free space. You either control all the motions with a joystick or it flies based on pre-programmed GPS coordinates. When UAVs have more intelligence and sensors on board, they can respond to their environment and don’t need pilots at all for takeoff and landing. This is when they start to become flying robots. I’m most interested in those aspects, unlike the hobby community where part of the game is to fly them. Businesses should be able to just push a button and flying robots can do the job autonomously, having the intelligence on board to recognize if somebody’s sneaking into a facility, for example.

What separates CyPhy Works and its UAVs from other flying robot companies?

We’re one of the only flying robot companies that are focusing on industrial applications. There are quite a few companies that have had success in the entertainment and hobbyist markets, but what’s going to be needed for the future are UAVs that can cross a city alone and stay up for long periods of time. These are the kind of UAVs that we work on here. So, we’re designing the environmentals, the longevity and the reliability to attack real industrial applications. We got our start in the military and we’ve already delivered vehicles there, and that gives us a really good to test out the reliability of our machines. There’s a saying that if you give soldiers a bowling ball, they’d find a way to break it. I had a guy once tell me he was going to throw one of our robots out the back of a C-130. Our machines have to operate in all conditions 24/7.

Tell us about your microfilament technology.

We’re attacking a different place in the market at first than other unmanned systems companies. The problem with competing UAVs is that they can fly for 30 minutes to an hour, but they can’t stay up and do the entire job. We’re building UAVs that can stay up 24/7. You put them up, continuously power them from the ground, transmit wired communications so you don’t have to worry about interception, and you can see an entire area from a bird’s eye view. Think of this of as a mini satellite system. We can provide full HD-quality video in real-time of your facility.

Where do you see the unmanned systems space five years from now?

I’ve been doing this for a long time and when we started iRobot, selling 100 robots would have been a dream comes true. We actually sold ten million Roombas and I think the flying robotics space really is at the tip of the iceberg of what we can do. I think large companies have suddenly realized that with the announcement of Amazon [AMZN] PrimeAir, with Google [GOOG] making eight acquisitions in robotics in 2013. I can’t think of an industry that’s not going to be affected by these unmanned systems. That really is the next step in technology- taking computers off the desktop and putting them in airspace. I’m really glad to have played a part from the beginning of commercialization.

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